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Why Climate Scientists Are Sounding the Alarm on the Ocean Circulation System AMOC

Union of Concerned Scientists

Last month, 44 climate scientists from 15 countries wrote an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers highlighting the risk of a potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean. Picture Quebec City in Canada and London in the UK.

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Why Were 2023 and 2024 So Hot?

Union of Concerned Scientists

Albedo is the total reflection of incoming solar radiation by Earth. As industrial aerosols decreased due to this new regulation, particularly over the North Atlantic Ocean, the planetary albedo slightly decreased, which means that more incoming solar radiation was absorbed by the planet rather than reflected. What is albedo?

2024 268
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What Is a Climate Model and How Does It Work?

Union of Concerned Scientists

Climate models are the main tool climate scientists use to predict how Earth will respond to more heat-trapping pollutants in the atmosphere. But what exactly is a climate model? Lets start off easy by breaking down the phrase climate model.” What causes a circulation? temperature, rainfall, etc.)

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How Do ‘Future Climate Scenarios’ Shape Climate Science and Inform Policy? 

Union of Concerned Scientists

Initially it used four different emission storylines from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) as a scientific basis, however, recognizing the need for a more flexible and policy-relevant framework, scientists developed the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) for the IPCC reports. Lower-emission scenarios (SSP1-2.6)

Radiation 149
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AR6 of the best

Real Climate

As climate scientists we tend to look at the IPCC reports a little differently than the general public might. Here are a few things that mark this report out from previous versions that relate to issues we’ve discussed here before: Extreme events are increasingly connected to climate (duh!) Figure SPM 8.

Sea Level 361
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Science denial is still an issue ahead of COP28

Real Climate

The only region of cooling is the northern Atlantic, where climate models have long predicted just that due to a slowing of the Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation. The heating of the global ocean has been going on at a steady rate of nine zeta Joules per year for decades , which is 15 times the worldwide primary energy consumption.

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A Nobel pursuit

Real Climate

In this, he is in violent agreement with Isaac Held, his colleague at GFDL, and indeed most climate scientists. Manabe’s subsequent work led to the development of the GFDL GCM, initially just including the atmosphere, but eventually with an ocean, and then the transient results shown in Manabe and Stouffer (1993).